Geography of Earth with WAY More Water (+2000m)
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- Опубликовано: 8 май 2024
- Enough talk about "historic sea levels" or "climate projections," today we're flooding the Earth with unrealistic amounts of water to see what we can new insights we can gain about our planet.
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"Deliberate Thought" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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Sources / Further Reading:
www.floodmap.net/
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.c...
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This is the most convoluted way to give Bolivia a coastline
maybe they could finally use their navy lol
😄!!
This would make a great map for a game world.
Especially with the whole "It was Earth all along" twist baked in.
not just game, but also novel, my idea is that some scientist try to create a portal to take water from water rich moon (such as ganymede) to solve world thirst, but inadvertently take too much water and flood earth instead
@@grissee I had an idea about that when I was younger, but it was aliens draining their planet's unnecessary oceans to earth to destroy us.
I was thinking this too! It would make a great futuristic world map for a game, after some kind of disastrous mistake caused Earth to have WAY more water in the oceans than it should have!
also think of the kinds of oceanic creatures that would evolve on a planet like this, where most of the surface was covered by deep ocean with very few land masses... Gets the imagination going!
@@grissee is this a Sci-Fi comedy? 🤣🤣
Living in Mexico in the central valleys, as soon as I started watching your interesting video, I began to realize that in this dystopian future, Mexico would be the country that would conserve the largest percentage of its territory in the world. Assuming that the event happened in a short time, Mexico would also keep its main cities since several of them are located above 2,000 meters, so I think that this would be the only way we would become a world power :)
Nepal, Butan, and probably Chile, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Ecuador, Bolivia, Turkey and Iran (altough I think Mexico is the largest):
@@SebastianBaos and China,Pakistan new Zealand,Papua New Guinea,Andorra, Ethiopia etc too
@@deadhandof9108doesn’t most of china live on the coast? tibet has a population of 4 million, the mountains in mexico have over half the population
what about usa and Colorado Wyoming western Montana utah idaho and Alaska and maybe Hawaii
@@parkerwebb3470 It seems to me that in terms of percentage, they do not have most of their territory above 2,000 meters above sea level.
I'll be honest, I never really paid much attention to the rivers in Asia, but after watching this video I found it fascinating that major tributaries of the Brahmaputra River (1806 miles long, then flows into the Ganges-Padma River (1569 miles long)), the Irrawaddy River (1422 miles long), the Salween River (2044 miles long), the Mekong River (3051 miles long), and the Yangtze River (3900 miles long) all start or pass within a strip of land 130 miles wide. The two furthest discharges are about 1950 miles apart as the raven flies, or around 5200 miles (4524 nautical miles) by sea.
Isn't this the climax of mission impossible fallout where they want to detonate a nuke there?
Im not reading all this numbers
Its km not miles noob
if sea levels were that high for millions of years, the landscape would of course look different because erosion and sedimentation cause landmass to "accumulate" at or around the altitude of sea level (in addition to different climate patterns causing different rates of erosion). areas much higher get eroded, and their sediments are deposited in deltas, increasing the amount of land that is near sea level. if you look at a graph that shows the total area of land on earth at a particular altitude, you will spot a distinct spike around sea level because that's where sea level has been ±100m for hundreds of millions of years. check out the same graph for mars and see if you can spot a spike that might represent what sea level could have been over there back when mars still had water
Wikipedia says that sea level has oscillated every ~100k years from (roughly) -50 to +250 meters over the last 500 million years :)
Your comment did make me think about how those deltas with/of eroded materials would be affected by ice ages.
It would mean that there are a lot more deltas under water, right? So that's a lot of comparatively shallow sea, which boosts marine life (/biomass).
And then, as sea level rises, we'd also expect the places that are 50 to 100 to 150 meters above sea level to look like deltas, too...
Google says that, for the last 2.6 million years, there usually was an ice age of 90k years and then a warm period of 10k years, so the currently-underwater deltas should be quite dominant!
However, I have _no idea_ whether erosion would just wipe it all out, over such time scales....
Anyhow, thanks for sending me down that rabbit hole 😂👍🏼
Yeah, the difference would be that the earth would be a little bit less dense and maybe there would be the same amount of continents but it would look totally different
And there would be a lot of volcanism
Had the same feeling. All those small islands would have no chance (or would merge?)
@@MrNicoJac Ice ages would probably affect sea levels a lot less in that world though, since there's _way_ less land -- especially in polar and subpolar regions -- for ice sheets to collect on. Sea ice doesn't affect sea level much at all, since it displaces as much water as it melts to become.
Is this the reason why russia(siberia) is so large today
Going to get in early rather than watch the video before commenting, because I absolutely love the concept and I want to see a follow-up video: What if the sea level was a lot LOWER? Not the 100-200m of an ice age, but 500 or 1000 meters, or maybe even more.
Yes! Would love to see it as well.
Yes! Great idea, I mentioned this to my dad(this video) and then he was talking about if the water was lower how the oceans has tons of mountains and basins. Very fascinating. Love your channel!!!!
Actually this is the hypothetical nonsense you get on Unveiled and What If. I expect more relevance on this channel.
That would be awesome!
Fascinating
This would be a bird-dominated world 100%
whitout food?
Yaks and birds lol
A world where Emus commiserate around the family hearth about the horrors of the Great Human War.
Fish
Maybe some pygmy moose aswell, they can swim for lomger than our mental health is prepared for, dive deeper on a breathhold than some divers on trimex and have a very "heads on" approach towards threats.....literally.
0:56 "This dosen't alter that planet that much"
Bangladesh: Confused 170 million people screaming
when you're so into islands that you have to imagine different ways exotic islands could exist.
islands are the best istg
Hahaha. I’m loving the videos though. 😂
@@TheOnlyCaprisun nice profile 😂
@@louisinese thanks! i made it myself.
There's a Stephen Baxter novel called Flood that is pretty fascinating. Follows a group of people as the seas rise like this, mostly because of water trapped beneath/in the crust finally breaking free and being forced up into the ocean by the weight of the plates, I think.
"Flood" doesn't actually explain where the water came from, but leaves it open for the sequel. Which also doesn't explain.
On the plus side, Baxter does argue the case that with extremely elevated sea levels the climate would be much warmer, which is relevant to this video.
@@pembrokeshiredan I remember watching an Anton video, where he said that over the course of 4.5B years, the Sun has stripped away about an ocean's worth of water from the surface of the Earth through breakdown of the H2O molecules (which is still happening today), and the hydrogen escaping Earth's gravity. Perhaps that's where the water came from if this never happened? Although the oxygen levels might be different if all of that broken-down water didn't leave its oxygen behind.
@@illegal_space_alien Earth actually have more water inside the mantel. The ringwoodite trapped about 2/3 of total water in Earth. This facts actually suggest why Earth have plat tectonic movement, it being assists by the water among the mineral in the mantel.
Theoretically, if Earth have a massive earthquake affected the whole world, the mantel would be less dense and volcanic eruption would happen in global scale. This will also depressurize the ringwoodite and release the water inside the mineral, and Earth will have 3x more water than in the ocean right now.
@@illegal_space_alien Hey, another Anton Petrov watcher! :) Good to see my peeps here. (Not THAT surprising--if you like one sciencey educational channel you might like others.) Anyway, two things I've learned from this: 1) I'd apparently be fine (in terms of drowning/not drowning, anyway) right where I am, if this suddenly just up and happened, and 2) I have a new sci-fi book to read. :)
@@illegal_space_alien We also get water from space. Comets are just dirty snowballs, so if they come down, we get more water. Also hydrogen inside the Earth combines with oxygen to get more H²O.
4 mountains in the Appalachian Mountains (Eastern US Mountains) poke right above the water line as little isolated islands in a giant sea.
and they would be by far the oldest landmasses on the planet
@@dane1382 That would be the Island of Roraima, and by a lot
Except it would be a whole small continent if sea levels were always 2000m higher not just a few peaks. The world would have vastly more land than in this video because erosion doesn't really cut away land to much below sea level, and runoff deposits sediment along coasts, plus erosion gets less intense with shallower slopes. So yeah, there'd be a whole content in Appalachia. There might even still be land masses from 1-2+ billion old mountains that might once have existed across the plains so the continent could have been even larger and possibly connected to the rest of North America.
And many other mountain ranges too, they are just too small to be called continents
@@j.f.fisher5318😊
The geography of the American SW's mountains is probably what fascinates me the most. You can see what becomes of the Sierra Nevada of California, the White Mountains/Mogollon Rim of Arizona, and the N-S ranges of Nevada. On that last region, I honestly can't think of an archipelago that looks like that at present sea levels.
Also, Pinetop-Lakeside would probably have to be renamed to Palmtop-Seaside, amirite?
Same and lol
I feel like this setting with tibet would be very interesting for how a civilization would start on it and grow. If there was a landmass like this surrounded by water. They’d have some flat lands good for building, lots of lakes and ponds, and they’d be sheltered by mountains all around. And then there’s those mountain range like islands north of them which could be later explored. Would be cool to have as a map in one of those games like that where you make a civilization
Exactly what I was thinking. The game Worldbox is good for this type of stuff so I may see if someone can make the Tibet Plateau for it.
Also I think Erosion would probably make some of the land in Tibet flat, idk if that’s completely wrong tho lol
@Mal_31 nah your right if the water rose then rain would rose too since many storms that happen is under that 2000m so rain would land on top where it was normally frozen eroding a little faster and flatten out the bases for more plains like area
I dropped a more comple response to this elsewhere but for example those 3 fjords wouldn't exist in a world that had 2000m higher sea level because that's the level where deposited sediment would overtake erosion and those would be river valleys near sea level instead of deep fjords. Just one tiny problem among countless issues this simplitic view of geology produces.
Tropico 5 fever dream
Oceanographer here, this was a great video! I especially like how it leads to open ended questions for thinkers of all disciplines. In my case, I would like to point out that the lack of substantial continental boundaries would lead to more energetic, circumplanetary annular currents at many latitudes. Currently, we only have this in the Southern Ocean in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. The shallow seas in North America and the Andes would likely still allow for western boundary currents, but there would doubtless be a lot of interesting interaction between water masses on either side of the archipelago, much like we see today between the Pacific and Indian oceans being connected through Indonesia.
Needless to say, all terrestrial climate would be some variety of oceanic, save for maybe the most sheltered of Tibetan uplands, while monsoons wouldn't exist due to a lack of large landmasses, which are involved in that climate process.
There's also the question of sea ice dynamics in the absence of continents, as well as the effect of a water world albedo on climate regulation compared to today's 30% land paradigm. This whole thought exercise would be an interesting problem to tackle with a coupled general circulation model.
By the way, if you ever do a follow-up on this from an oceanographic standpoint, or do a completely different ocean-heavy video, I'd be happy to provide help! (proofing, feedback, etc.)
Man I’d love to see renders of a coupled GCM running this…
@@TAP7a Same! The problem is, such a necessarily global model would require a lot of computer time to run, and considering this is of basically no value to the kind of oceanography funding agencies care about, it would be hard to get it up and running as a proper study. On the other hand, exoplanet research might benefit from it, seeing as Earth already has real bathymetry, which means we wouldn't have to guess it or approximate it away in order to model a semi water world planet. At the very least it could be a good undergraduate senior thesis
When the ice caps melt (less weight), does the floating crustal land mass rise?
@@john9982 I do not think so. In this scenarion there is still extra 2000 meter tall water column pushing on them. And ice is less dense e.g. lighter than ice, so pressure on the landmass would be even higher IMHO.
Just wanted to say thank you. I found your channel a couple months back and I’m hooked! The way you explain makes it so easy to understand and very enjoyable to learn
not to be pedantic, but the Rocky Mountains in North America are above 2000 meters - the lowest point is 7630 feet or 2325 meters. I live in the foothills of the Rockies and the idea of moving a few miles west, and having great beach front property to boot, is very appealing.
I don’t understand the basis for his video. Lots of area is higher than 6500 ft above sea level. Seems like an odd thing to get wrong right off the bat and it turns me off from this video and the rest of his content.
@@sleep_sounds Some areas are well above 2000m in the Rockies, but not enough to form a unified continent-sized landmass.
I'd like to see the effects of sea level if we swapped the altitude of the tallest mountain with the depth of the bottom of the ocean - ie. if the sea level dropped so that Challenger deep, currently at -10,971m, was now only -8,848m - this is just a bit more than 2000m of sea level drop, so would be a pretty good companion to this video.
I'd also like to speculate on the ecology of my home country, NZ, in the scenario of +2000m: it wouldn't change much. It'd still be an isolated group of islands dominated by birds who could fly/swim here then diversify into various niches that are filled by mammals elsewhere. There'd be significantly less land, and there would be little variety in climate among the land that remains, so there would be less biodiversity overall.
We’re getting into territory that’s really hard to predict, but with so much extra water, wouldn’t the different distribution of weight on the tectonic plates cause them to move differently anyways? Tibet, the Andes, the Rockies and so on might not even form if all the extra water was here from the beginning. So this makes a fun exercise if the earth suddenly got an extra 2km depth of water, but god knows what the landmasses would develop like if we started with the extra water.
The clear answer would, mammals & humans wouldn't be here today, exercising these theories
I wonder, would the poles still have ice-masses?
like giant permafrost adrift in the global ocean, that'd be pretty cool
Also planets bulge at their equator due to rotational forces, and adding any extra mass on top of that would itself be subject to that same bulge, so adding a uniform 2 km of water across the surface of the earth would redistribute itself to be less than that at the poles and more than that at the equator. It would never be as simple as just adding 2,000m to sea level worldwide, even disregarding differences due to long-term factors like erosion and effects of pressure from different weight distributions.
I calculated 859,074,600,000,000 tons of additional weight due to all that water. Seems like it would make a huge difference and sink all the current continental plates and eventually they would become oceanic plates as well. Only places like Hawaii built on oceanic plates would survive I think.
We'd be an intelligent fish species like in aquaman
Tibet and the Andes are great but I feel like there could've been more stress on the archipelagos that remained(like the Cordillera archipelago you talked about). It would be a great showing of what island specific phenomena are out there as there would be islands in the most diverse of places. Also I feel like 1000m while not as extreme would also be very interesting. Great vid!
'In Plain Sight' seems like a great name for a series where you work through places in the world that we don't realize are x, y, z and how changing just one thing about the earth (in this case sea levels) showcases what they truly are.
There was a documentary made about this topic over 25 years ago. It´s called Waterworld.
huh
😆
Narrated by Kevin Costner!
Tectonic processes would be significantly altered by this much water, just the weight of it alone would alter how the rocks of the crust move, fold etc. At some point too much water might even shutdown plate tectonics as we know it. Ultimatly land and water are intimatly connected an one can't be altered without effecting the other.
The average density of the lithosphere (which makes up the most of the plate-material) is around 3g./cm³ and is, in the large majority of areas, significantly more than 2km. thick, so the weight of the water you're adding on top of them is a fraction of their own weight. The calculation shows that a block of the lithosphere that is one kilometer by one kilometer and two kilometers thick will weigh approximately 6 billion metric tons; 2000 meters of water on top of that is a third the weight. Given that the density of the material underlying the lithosphere is *greater* ... and that the lithosphere may well be thicker than 2 kilometers (& thus weigh even more) - how much subsidence can you expect?
People who aren't used to it, have problems conceptualizing measurements where 500,000,000 tons isn't really all *that* big a number, but when doing astronomical calculations (masses of large asteroids and the like) ... meh ...
@@ephennell4ever very funny words, magic man =D
@@ephennell4ever There was major tectonic shifting at the end of the last Ice Age with the meltwater pulses raising sea levels to around their current position. Northern North America lost it's ice sheet and due to the relief of all that weight, raised up a few thousand feet. The African continent has risen 1500 feet since then. So you saying this much water would not affect plate tectonics is inaccurate. One thing you seem to be forgetting is, while the Lithosphere is dense and the magma underneath it is denser (as you would expect moving toward the center of mass), magma is a fluid and therefore more compressible, allowing it to be forced to move by increased mass above it.
@@ephennell4ever I've never seen someone try and sound this smart when saying something that even common sense tells you is wrong
@@ephennell4ever You just proved yourself wrong while still being right lol. You’re completely correct but you forgot that the water gets compressed and weighs more at lower depths, to be honest both the water and plates will end up weighing similar amounts due to the same process of pressure
This is a fantastic video! I absolutely loved this and I can't wait for more! How about what would Earth look like with a 2000m sea level drop?
Oh You see essentially Atlantis And Can walk from North America to Japan through Europe
America and Russia would have a land border, Saudi Arabia and and Iran would have a land border, God the chaos that could happen here.
I was always fascinated by this, im glad you made a video on it.
As a Mexican I would love a video about the geography, geology, biology and ecology of Mexico, as one of (if not the most) diverse country in the continent with every climate except for the polar one
He's talked about our country in his 7 realms of biogeography video; an honorific mention as a great transitional zone between the Neoartic and the Neotropical realms. If you take a road trip from the Mexican highlands through either one of the Sierra Madre mountain ranges, and head to the coast, you'll witness an outstanding change in flora and weather that really makes oneself feel like traveling a colossal distance when you're actually just traversing a couple hundred kilometers as the crow flies.
Too many people have no idea what Mexico is like. I sing its praises to all that listen. Too many are shocked to find it's in North America. I can't think of a South or Central American country that I haven't at one time or another had to tell someone wasn't a place in Mexico, so it's not surprising though you'd think that would mean people wouldn't think its one big desert.
@@AJNpa80 just like fox news when they called latin American countries Mexican countries 🥲
Toluca is almost one of those cities of eternal spring, just far enough from the equator to have a winter and should never feel like a steam bath (like Florida) due to the elevation
i would like to see this also
I love this speculative biogeography!
Honestly, if you do go further down this path, you might even want to make a colab with the "Curious Archive", YT channel dedicated to studying the speculative biology of games as well as art projects and books.
Could be very interesting seeing you two together
I absolutely love these kind of videos, geography and geology is so interesting. Also other fields such as climatology, meteorology, astronomy, biology, etc in other videos. Really love learning about the natural world!
A video on how the Amazon was formed would be very interesting. From the original Amazonian craton with the river running from east to west and flowing into the Ecuadorian Pacific coast to the uplift of the Andes, with the formation of the Pebas Sea and its subsequent drainage to the northwest and west in the current basins of the Orinoco River and Amazon River respectively (after a small rise of the Vaupés arch of hills in the southwestern part of the Guianian shield which separated the waters of both basins and created the current white sands forests in the ancient beaches of the Pebas Sea). Additionally, this upheaval of the Andes in Colombia with its three mountain ranges (first the central one of volcanic origin due to subduction, then the western one due to subduction and finally the eastern one also due to folding due to subduction) and two inter-Andean valleys (product of pauses in the subduction of the Pacific plate under the Amazonian craton) divided the Amazonian fauna into a cis-Andean group (on the current side of the Amazon) and another trans-Andean (on the western side of the Andes and which includes the inter-Andean valleys of Cauca and Magdalena and the Colombian Caribbean coast) within what is today one of the most biodiverse areas on the planet: the biogeographic Chocó (in the Colombian-Ecuadorian Pacific). Many of the bird species that inhabit both sides are very similar after allopatric speciation. For example, the Amazonian Pteroglossus pluricinctus is very similar to the Pacific Pteroglossus torquatus. The same happens with Cephalopterus ornatus and penduliger from the Amazonian and Pacific side respectively. The list is huge and could give you many more examples if you decide to make a video on this topic that includes tectonic processes, orogeny of the Andes, origin of Amazon and Orinoquía, evolution of sister species of birds and an explanation of why Colombia is the country with the largest number of species of birds in the world. I have some nice articles about every item and never seen a video about it in youtube! PS: the epilogue of this story is the collision of Panama against Colombia creating the bridge that allowed the exchange of species between North and South America.
Finally someone talks about the Valle del Cauca.
An interesting thought would be how Antartica would (slowly) rise when the weight of the thick layer of ice would have disappeared. The same process which is still happening in Scandinavia.
This is a place where new land could possibly form and animals which arrive here could become giants. While everywhere else the fauna would most likely shrink down in size.
That's true, if the ice melted, the pressure would push the actual rocky continent upwards.
Apparently I have the memory of a goldfish; I just remembered that glaciers push continents downward & affect the elevation of the land beneath them, that was literally the case with Scandinavia, ignore what I originally commented
The same would happen to greenland
5:55 - fun fact: "Hengduan" in Chinese means "cutting horizontally," suggesting that these North-South mountains have posed a significant challenge for travellers going East-West.
Interesting fact, thanks!
I feel bad for the poor soul who first named it. (Joke)
Chile: I am the longest thing in south america
Andes: Hold my LENGTH
Bro you're the geography teacher we all needed back in highschool!! 🙌 love all your videos!!
Underwater geography would be cool. Like what’s up with the massive amount of sunken islands, seamounts, and underwater volcanoes there are. I think we get so caught up with what’s happening on land that we forget that most of earths geography is underwater
It reminds me of a web project I saw a while ago that investigated different environments called the Planetocopia. It had several categories including several modifications to earth: one particularly significant one being changing the location of the poles, including:
Seapole: Both poles are located in the ocean.
Shiveria: Both Poles are located on land.
Turnovia: Poles are reversed, inverting ocean currents.
Jaredia: Relocating the poles to create a more habitable and societally unified Earth.
You have a tremendous talent for science communication! Such a great way of explaining the concepts
Super interesting! I think we want a 2000 meter lower sea level example too!
And both 1000 meters higher and lower sea levels would be super interesting as well!
I find it really interesting to imagine humanity trying to survive an apocalyptic event such as this, with some major cities like La Paz, Bolivia being able to remain unscathed, while most others are hundreds of meters below sea level.
Read Flood by Stephen Baxter. It’s totally about that.
Well, many people could migrate into cities, towns that are unscathed
You would find hundreds of islands where present day Taiwan is, as there are at least 269 peaks over 3000 meters, and another 38 over 2900 meters tall. Some of these islands will be connected, since the ridges are also likely over 2000 meters tall. It's the result of the Philippine Sea Plate ramming into the Yangtze Plate.
also greenland, he forgot to mention mongolia and antarctica / portions of siberia too
Just imagining the effect of a submerged Yellowstone super-volcanic eruption. Also, every time i see the sea level rise that far i get vertigo and anxiety. Great video!
Man, I would love a one hour episode about earth's geography with -1000m sea level!
Specifically the southwestern pacific is so fascinating to me.
If this scenario were going to happen suddenly today, I find it interesting that the biggest cities that would survive would be Mexico City, Bogotá, Addis Ababa, Sana'a and Quito. I had expected all of them, except for Sana'a. I didn't know it was so high above sea level.
On another note, the tibetan landmass looks a lot like Roshar from the Stormlight Archive. I wonder if Sanderson had his inspiration for Roshar after a thought experiment like this one.
La Paz, Bolivia isn't that big? Peru also has quite a few even above 3000m but they're not that big
Lhasa in Tibet, china would also survive as its above 3000m.
Mt Ararat also managed to get dragged into Warhammer 40k franchise. Last bastion of resistance to the Earth's unification by the Emperor.
Makes me wonder how big of a deal hurricanes would be with 2 much smaller continents. And I agree with others, I am keen to see what much lower sea levels would look like. Excellent video, thankyou
Loved this one! I'd watch a series on every continent and wild conjecture lol
I am a professional geologist and I want you to know that I love this so so so much. This seriously made my day and I will be subjecting everyone I know that would be even remotely interested to it.
It's fun until you start thinking about how erosion would have proceeded differently if sea levels were 2000m higher, how volcanic islands would have built higher as well. And how less effective erosion of ancient mountains would have allowerd future orogenies to uplift much greater areas about these higher seas.
"Island biogeography part 1-3"
"Earth's lost islands"
"Island's that aren't islands"
Now the man is making more islands... he must be stopped
Geography explains so much of history and is very important👏🏻🙌🏻👍🏻
Yes 🙌🏽
This was a surprisingly informative and enjoyable video :)
The quality of these videos is just magnificent. I really don't know why more people don't watch you. You explain concepts like this so clearly and in such a fun way, i don't feel bored in trying to remember all the points, i just have fun and i learn. Its hard to do that and you have done it. Very underrated
@@cruz7579 what if its not cringe? what if its just that people dont care to enjoy what he does and only care about the fact that sure he talks in a kinda cringy american accent. the internet is full of shit, so people who look at shit would be convinced that everything here is shit, but this guy isn't.
i have no idea if that made sense
I think the 'most interesting' sea level biologically would be that which puts as much of the earth as possible between 0 and 200 meters underwater. I haven't the first clue how to figure out what that level would be, but if you've got the ambition to tackle that one I'd love to see what you come up with.
200m is about the depth of the edge of the continental shelf around the continents.
If the water was around 450 m higher than today, that would put a lot of area under about 100 m of water
Sea levels were an average 170 metres higher in the cretaceous than today. there was little to no ice at the poles and continents were not having that high mountains as today.
I think it could be an interesting experiment to take the height map of the Earth and invert it, so the highest points become the deepest. Then flood it with either the same amount of water Earth currently has, or with just enough to have the current percentage of dry land.
Very cool idea
Hello, first off I would like to say that you have done an amazing job! I really enjoyed watching the content and found that it was very informative and well made.
At 20:15 - 20:35 mins you asked for input about what water levels people would like you to show and talk about. In this regard, I have several suggestions for you to consider.
1. At 17:40 - 17:48 mins of the video, there is a beautiful clip of the continents separating from one land mass into their current positions. I would like to see this same illustration, but with different water levels. One at todays water levels, one with +500m of water, one with +1000m of water, one with +1500m of water, and one with +2000m of water.
Assuming anything like Humanity would evolve on this world, and assuming the human equivalent involves in the same location as us, the homeland of humanity would be in the Ethiopian archipelago. I'm unsure exactly how large of a population this could Foster, and if they do get seafaring, and go exploring and island-hopping like the early Polynesians, probably with a large population up in the Turkish archipelago before heading east if they ever run across Tibet their population would explode. I don't know if they would ever have the technology until steamtech to actually get to the Andean continent, but if by some miraculous chance they do headed towards what we would refer to as the new world, they're more likely to run into the Rockies and Mexican archipelagos first as there are roughly on the same or similar latitude.
What about contemporary humans? (Us, that exist right now, like you and me) how would *we* survive on this world?
@@cons9053 it would be a little tricky, but not necessarily impossible. Considering all of the lands are quite a bit in altitude, any contemporary human living on that world would have to deal with altitude sickness and or adapt. Not to mention because of radically different evolutionary paths, there would be no recognizable animal or plants to eat, so any settlers to this version of Earth would need to figure out what they could and couldn't eat. And considering most of the globe is covered in water, storms should be a doozy, but people have been dealing with bad weather since the dawn of humanity I'm sure someone living there could adapt. Since all the land is pretty much the tops of mountains, cave systems might be an option. Those don't blow down in a stiff breeze.
Thank you for saying "If all the ice in Antarctica melted" not "The arctic". I took oceanography and I'm very, very tired of the disinformation being pumped out pretending that if the north pole melted, sea levels would change in volume.
For those wondering, the south pole is ice sitting on a continent, while the north pole is just floating ice.
Free-floating ice doesn't increase volume of the body it sits in when it melts. The reason it was floating in the first place was because it was displacing it's own mass already.
He made a short about that exact thing like a few dats ago.
It's really insanely crazy to think all landmasses are almost under water. I wish you talked about possible marine fauna and flora. Amazing video like always thank you
Ok so I'm no biology expert but I am fauna enthusiast and my knowledge mostly comprised from watching yt videos😅 so I'm open open to all suggestions...
Firstly I want to mention is that whales might thrive in this ecosystem might get even larger
2) The largest big cat might be the snow leopard from the Himalayas
3) Seals , sea lions , sea otters will also be able to cpoe up with this ecosystem mostly living around those archipelago
4 ) For birds the aquatic speciation increase
Green lands hidden Mountains will also be a massive continent So i would like to see a part 2 of some sorts over this sea level visualization is the best!
Yeah I’m surprised they didn’t talk about it past a quick glance at 14:32
also worht mentioning that there would be a small scandinavian arcipelago, which he didn't mention
That is taking into account the ice caps, if you remove the ice caps the landmass would be a lot smaller and be broken up into multiple islands
@@zraithbc They would rebound as well.
Loved this video, always a treat.
You mentioned deserts, but I don't expect any world with this little land would actually have any. Anything out of the tropics would likely have a "New Zealand-like" climate.
It really depends on how you define a desert. The Ka'ū Desert in Hawaii is on the leeward side of the island and experiences a rainshadow, though most of the lack of vegetation comes from volcanic-based acid rain.
The Andean continent would certainly experience a rainshadow as well, as it does currently. And they would also likely have polar deserts down in the remnants of Antarctica if the temperatures remained anywhere near the current ones ( though this is unlikely). There may not be any true deserts, but there would certainly be areas of much lower precipitation.
@@BonaparteBardithion would arid climate be possible with that narrow of piece of landmass tho? I gather that with the proximity from the sea the air current would always reach the most inward land area carrying rain.
@@amirulhakim9898
Semi-arid could certainly be possible just taking wind direction into account. But that's assuming that weather patterns in any way still resemble our current ones with that much moisture in the air.
The Cape Verde Islands (Cabo Verde) in the Atlantic have an arid climate today. There is a rain shadow effect on the higher islands (all of volcanic origin) creating micro climates, but the main problem is that the sea air at that latitude doesn't reliably carry much moisture. The islands are at the same latitude as the southern edge of the Sahara desert. In most years the winds don't carry enough moisture for the uplift over the islands to cause much precipitation. Indeed, in some years there is severe drought, which has causing periodic famines in the islands' roughly 550 year recorded inhabited history.
The dry air isn't primarily caused by the presence of the nearby Sahara desert, which would disappear in this water Earth scenario (the tops of the highest Cabo Verde mountain peaks would remain). Rather it is the Hadley Cell nature of atmospheric circulation of the entire planet which causes both the Sahara desert and the fluctuating, irregular but generally very arid Cabo Verde climate.
Some similar type of circulation would inevitably also exist on water Earth. Basically the sun heats the ocean more at the equator than at the poles, so the atmosphere is set in motion by this. Hot wet air therefore rises from the sea surface at the equator and moves north and south. But it starts cooling, and water precipitates out, forming the generally wet regions around the equator. By about 20 degrees north and south the air is dry again and falling, creating dryer high pressure conditions on most of the planet in the 20 to 40 latitude band on today's world. Most of the present world's deserts lie within this band.
Cabo Verde lies just to the south, the islands scattered around latitude 16 degrees north of the equator, where the boundary between the rising wet and falling dry air cells lie. Most of the time it is on the dry side, but it sometimes gets bursts of sudden downpours which is why anything grows there at all.
This boundary zone extends around the planet at the same latitudes north and south of the equator. It moves around a bit and brings unpredictable weather.
In the water Earth scenario there still would presumably be Hadley circulation cells and such boundaries between them. But the absence of most of today's continents might produce a more regular pattern with smoother transitions. So perhaps the bits of Cabo Verde's mountain peaks poking out of the water, perhaps from just today's Fogo island, would experience a more regular climate.
Would this be wetter or dryer? If the circulation pattern was smoother, the boundary zone might be narrower, putting the islands more reliably on the wetter, equatorial side of the line, where their latitude suggests they should be. On the other hand, the maximum height of the islands projecting out of the water would be reduced by 2000 metres, leaving only at most 800 metres of elevation to generate relief rainfall. So the remnant islands would probably be less parched, and perhaps boasting a few rivers and streams, but probably not drenched and covered in rainforest.
Edit: I have decided I don't understand the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ), which had a bit part in the preceding analysis, now deleted. Most accounts of Cabo Verde's climate mention the ITCZ, which moves around nearby threatening various calamities including tropical storms and drought.
Thanks for the content creation 🙏🏾
very cool video.
it would be cool if you had also talked about antarctica and greenland since theyre pretty elevated.
was thinking the same thing :)
Seeing the Earth with far lower sea levels would be interesting, as would speculating on what the Earth might look like with drastically different continental drift speed (if that even makes any difference) or erosion rates. Loved the video.
This is really helpful for my idea of a smaller water world with a small "archipelago cotenant" chain where amphibious flight comes before landmasses poke out of the oceans long enough to allow walking creatures. Also this video terrifies me a lot.
Two ideas in a similar vein for future videos:
1) Imagining if one or more of our modern continents were missing: no Africa, or no North America, or no Eurasia
2) Imagining if the axis of rotation of Earth was shifted 90 degrees, e.g. one end of the axis in the Pacific, the other end in Africa
You're best thing i have found recently
Thanks 🙏
Mexico City is 2240 meters above sea level, most people don't know that Mexico is a mountainous country, that's why the center north is mainly desert.
Most Latin American countries that lie on the Pacific are also mountainous
@@seanthe100 More like all of them.
If sea levels had always been that high it would be interesting to see what is able to evolve quickly on land given the very temporary nature of land masses on an evolutionary and geological time scale. Perhaps we would see a lot more amphibians dominate the terrestrial landscapes.
On such time scales wouldn't it still make more sense to adapt fully to dominating the dry terrain that would exist largely the same for hundreds to thousands of generations at the very least? Amphibians wouldn't necessarily dominate coastal areas as it hasn't been dominated by amphibians by mass given more mass exists fully adapted to ocean/seas and land separately and not much that is amphibious other than swamp land.
Whales with big feet? 🐋👣🐳
Or penguins like the video suggests 🐧🐧🐧
Hey now I'm sure many others would pay $ to see a multiple hundred hours long video of you guessing what each and every single islands biogeography would be like on this form of earth, but yeah that would take forever love the vid m8
Thank you so much AtlasPro for using an interesting premise to look at world geography. This is one of my favorite videos from your channel. Do you think in world where sea levels are 2 kilometers higher, there would be a large archipelago ringing the entire former Pacific Ocean marking where the ring of fire is today? I am also curious about how much landmass Japan would lose with a 2000 meter rise in sea levels. I learned from RealLifeLore that the country is so mountainous that the vast majority of its population are squeezed into a few cities like Tokyo and Osaka.
Love how you use this absurd scenario to teach some fun plate tectonics in an intuitive way!
Imagine how would human civilization would work in this Earth. The great empire of Tibet, the pirates of the rookies. So much potential for world building right here.
let's say humans evolved to reach behavioral modernity in tibet. there would be a LOT going on in tibet. empires, migrations, wars, etc, but it would take very very long until humans ventured beyond the islands they could see over the horizon, like the zagros. crossing the atlantic or pacific would have to wait until a much later stage of technical developement or would require a much larger incentive than what enabled colonialism originating from europe.
The eurasian parte of the world would host a modernization of their people, while the américas would be land of maorí like types of civilizations, that would conquer the andeans, México and the rookies depending on the latitude
It would be horrible lots of war, migration so on
@@kyb2027 ah just like real life
YOU ARE THE BEST ATLAS PRO!
20:00
There are several reasons why earth could end up this way, One Earth has far more water underneath Its continents in its magma than it ever has had on its surface In fact how do you think we got this water in the first place?
Second, Comet shower, Could quite literally add to the amount of water to our planet.
Third, Solar flares have the capacity to ad material to planets, For example the moon and Mars art supposed to have much of any of an atmosphere yet during certain solar storms all the planets and our Solar System including the. Men and Mars temporarily gained an out in the sphere because of the solar wind, This is something the obviously effects Earth to. 😅❤
Had earth always had as much water as demonstrated in this video I find it highly unlikely that any land fauna and flora would develop much past the early carboniferous period, as land would be too fleeting. Everything that did evolve would have to be capable of propagating over distances of water. Land animals would be semi-aquatic or very small, and the plant life would depend on wind and water for seed dispersal. Mammals could not possibly have evolved, and I doubt that, if flight ever did evolve, that it would develop sufficiently to survive the next inundation.
Where I used to live on the west side of Nairobi was almost exactly 2000m in elevation, so it would have become beach-front property. Somehow I was expecting the Kenyan highlands to be more extensive on your new earth than they were.
I grew up in the Wasatch mountains and went to Wasatch High School. You said Wasatch really funny 😂
I did something for my alt-historical fantasy Earth for d&d, but added two whole continents to displace water, and took a few major creatives liberties after using a map I found online to show extreme extra water level rise. It was fun and created an interesting map. Nowhere even near this extreme though.
The reason for the Rockies being more chaotic than Tibet or the Andes has very little to do with their age or erosion. It is because of different orogenic events that created the mountains in a connected, but haphazard way, most specifically the Laramide Orogeny in the east and south (Colorado, New Mexico, Mexico) and the Sevier Orogeny in the west and north (Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Canada). The two orogenies can be traced through northern Utah where they meet. The Rockies are also unique because of the shallower angle of the subduction of the Farallon Plate under the North America Plate, causing the mountains to rise almost a 1000 miles from the Pacific Ocean, and spreading the mountain building over a broader area, and lower overall elevation, than a similar subduction in South America of the Nazca Plate being subducted.
Whst I find interesting is how much different North America would look if the mountains raised by those ancient orogenies could only be eroded down to approach sea level, how much more massive would the forms taken by later orogenies be? Surely there would be vastly more land above the higher seas than we get by simplistically increasing sea levels after millions or in some cases billions of yeas of erosion above sea level have already proceeded.
Great video as always as seen with the intro
Btw, if you have time, can you perhaps do a geography or cover of planet mercury's terrain in the future? I havent seen a lot of people doing that and I thought it would be a good topic to cover
Well, Mercury is a dead planet, meaning that it doesn't have tectonic plates or volcanic activity. It's surface is like our moon's surface: Full of craters, no life and no atmosphere
It's just a boring rock that could be used to mining due to it's amounts of iron, copper and steel
Good thought experiment. The only issue, and I imagine you're painfully aware of it, is that if the world had had that much water, water erosion would have been much higher and not even Tibet would have resisted it. The mountains that "survive" in your video would have either not formed or been eroded away already.
Most interesting. Thanks for the presentation
Could you please make a video about ancient Martian bodies of water? Or maybe paleoareology in general? I find it fascinating that Mars had very real seas and glaciers in the past, but it's so hard to find estimates of what areas they were in exactly and how expansive they were. It's so cool to think about how the red planet changed and how it was very much like the dying world early sci-fi writers imagined, in the real past.
The sea level map around 11:25 always intrigued me, so I'm glad you made this video. Now I'd like to see a video that's maybe around 2000-4000 feet extra sea level, where we would still see the tops of the Appalachians and whatnot. Looking at how the bio-geography would change as these islands are made would be super interesting!
even at 2000m you'd see the top of the appalachains in parts (notably NC). Something is wrong with this video. The tibetan tableau is (on average) 14,000 ft in elevation - there are dozens of peaks in the Rockies that are that tall.
Atlas pro:"If sea levels were to rise for about 70 meters it wouldn't alter the layout of the planet all that much".
Me being dutch:"Bro, my entire country just disappeared".
That much additional water adds an insane amount of weight. I can see much more violent eruptions and seismic events. These in turn could make life turf side much more difficult.
I think a planet like this would have a hard time to evolve fully terrestial life. With continents that only get to ~100 million years of age before being submerged again, I would assume that amphibians, fish and arthropods would reign supreme.
Great video! Would love to see the other way round. And see what land masses emerge if sea level drops by 10m 100m 1000m
Answer to the ararat question, idk if you'll ever see this: 1) it's not certain that it was what is called ararat in modern day, and it says mountains of ararat, which is much broader. 2) the flood wasn't caused by an infusion of new water, but would've logically been produced by rising less-dense fresh oceanic crust caused by runaway subduction. The rising crust would've pushed the water of the oceans over the continents, and then as it subsided as it cooled, the oceans would've receded. In addition the continents would've been uplifted at the end of the flood, and the highest peaks were only formed late, otherwise they would've had time to be eroded. This is called the catastrophic plate tectonics model
Neat idea, great attitude! Seems like you're off on everything west of the Rockies until basically the coast.
This guy uploading this video at 4am PST? Dang, that's commitment!
Well it’s 7am EST right now and he is from New York so…
Do you think Mt. Erebus and the remaining Antarctic mountains would still retain their polar climate, even with all the moderating effects of the water surrounding and isolating them?
I'd say that the Antarctic circumpolar current would likely still prevent much heat from migrating in from warmer waters. The question of polar ice sheets didn't come up in this video, but I'd imagine that they'd have a significant impact on the climate and biogeography in a world with so little land.
@@Deadlyish The Antarctic Circumpolar Current wouldn't exist without the massive circular landmass directly covering the pole. Such a world wouldn't have an ice cover at all, especially given that water vapour is a potent greenhouse gas. We're only in a temporary glacial period now because of the unusual land configuration (Antarctica blocks water from reaching the south pole, while Eurasia and North America are mostly blocking currents from reaching the north pole). Throughout most of Earth's history, there was tropical vegetation at the poles.
I think it would be the reverse: without the poleward deflection of low-latitude water and the presence of hot-summer continental regions, polar climates would probably extend to 45 degrees or so (with the possible exception of southern Andea). I realized this when imagining a world without the largest continental mainlands (for example, most of the British Isles having a tundra biome).
Wow man that fact about the three rivers around the 5 minute 30 mark is just so awesome
what
Another interesting video, you make it even more exciting
Atlast pro LOVES island SO MUCH he decided to make the whole planet one.
I’d really like to know what effects the shallow seas formed by the former continents would have on marine ecosystems.
Or could with tweaking the water level.
This was very interesting thank you!
Hands down the coolest science channel on youtube
Great video! Raises lots of questions about the possibilities of life in this waterworld. With so much less fauna (even if there was an abundant plant life on what land remains), how would that affect O2 and CO2 levels in the atmosphere, and thus the oxygen breathing animals on Earth?
since this is nice "what-if" series... if we remove all the water on the earth, can we walk freely in Mariana Trench? I guess we would need a series of "adaptations" like when climbing Mt. Everest (?)
If you can hit that water bucket MLG, yes.
@@WuffiePhoenix yeah sure but i hope do a video about it.
I from Dominican Republic, we have the highest mountains in the Caribbean being the "Pico Duarte" the most highest with 3,175m (9,610ft) located in the "Cordillera Central". Taking into account this scenario, it would be the only place in the Caribbean that would remain in surface added to other small surrounding archipelagos in the mountain range, in what was once the island "Hispaniola".
This channel is simply incredible